I think I found it. The perfect solution to teaching yourself HOW to make oscommerce LOOK good.

We all know that the stock oscommerce will NOT turn your e-commerce business into a world dominating retailer. Its made to be a skeleton which you should build on.. The thing is, unless you are an expert coder, you can’t just jump in and make it look like the professional store that you want. You can have all of the graphic design skills in the world, but you NEED to know how to change what you see on your screen into what you see in your mind.

So this is the book i URGE you to pick up:
oscbook designing oscommerce

WHY buy a book when you can get all the info you ever want on the internet for free??
Well, thats an easy one. Because contrary to popular belief, forums do NOT give you instant feedback.. Books do! The only thing you have to do with a book is look in the index. With a forum you have to first search your question, then weed through all of the useless posts, then when you can’t find the answer, ask the question and HOPE someone sees it before it gets buried in the sea of useless stupid ANNOYING questions like “How do I change the text on my website”BOOKS will always be sitting there on your shelf, so when you need to re-teach something to yourself, you don’t have to pull your hair out because you didn’t bookmark that page.
IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN GETTING STARTED MAKING YOUR SITE LOOK LIKE YOU ENVISION IT – click the BUY NOW button to go to paypal and checkout to get your book ASAP
If you want more information, you can visit the writer’s website HERE

I have officially been working with oscommerce for 2 years now, and I started by learning the good old fashioned way – that is MAKING MISTAKES!! Thank god that I have the good frame of mind to backup my work before i even START thinking about making changes to my site.. But here’s the thing, there are a few tips that can make doing things in oscommerce a tad bit easier.

First is ALWAYS MAKE A BACKUP!!! because you WILL mess up, and you WILL cry long hours if you dont
second, USE A MERGE PROGRAM! Its so obvious, but yet people still forget that they exist. When you install contributions, dont go through the code piece by piece, just open the contribution file and your file side by side and merge them. You can use WinMerge(for PC) or DiffMerge(for mac) BOTH are free, and both will save you a LOT of time.

and FINALLY. GOOGLE YOUR ISSUES!! There is nothing more annoying than going to a user forum and seeing the same issue posted over and over again. And the thing is, these people THINK they will get instant gratification because they THINK people will just come by and give them an answer. Well, that’s rare true. If you simply go head over to google and type in the following:
site:forums.oscommerce.com then paste your error here
You will get ALL of the threads on that site that reference your particular error.

Now there is one bit of info that I have to give you that might be common sense to one person, but not to the others.. When you copy your error, DONT include your file path. No one else in the world is going to have the same file path as you. So JUST include the error. PLEASE.

So that’s it for now. It know its been a while since I updated, but i promise, i will be back more often. I will try to update at minumum once a week. In the meantime, if you have questions about oscommerce, please post them here. I will be happy to answer them.